When it comes to Ivy League pride, sometimes the classic, hideously overpriced school sweatshirt just doesn’t cut it. Every eighth grade valedictorian and Japanese tourist on earth owns a Harvard sweatshirt–even that freaky homeless guy at the bus stop has one from Cornell. God, how are we supposed to show our school spirit and simultaneously let the rest of the world know that we’re genuine, certified Ivy League snots?

Praise be to New Balance, purveyor of all things douchey, for giving us the answer: fugly Ivy footwear.

According to EUKicks, a blog for sneaker fans (hey, it takes all kinds), the company will be releasing a line of Ivy-League-themed hiking shoes this January. The shoes, which are riffs on an existing model of New Balance sneaker, will come in hues “inspired” by each university’s colors, and will feature an interpretation of each school’s crest on the tongue.

Bwog’s already raising its eyebrows at the Columbia version, whose two tones of blue aren’t “Columbia blue,” apparently. That’s a bit fussy of them, seeing as how the Princeton shoe is a random stinky beige and Dartmouth’s is inexplicably black.

New Balance has decided it will only manufacture six flavors of Ivy League sneaker. Cornell and Yale, you’re out of luck. No doubt Yalies have enough idiotic hipster footwear to tide them over for the next eight centuries, but it’s a shame about Cornell–this could really have put them on the map, you know?

In theory, this sneaker gimmick suggests that anyone who’d like to walk all over the Ivy League can now purchase the means to do so. But in practice, we can’t help but think that the primary consumers of these hideous foot turds will be the same jerks who play squash at the Yale Club or wear their Princeton tie pins on job interviews. In the highly unlikely event that New Balance makes a profit on their Ivy League line, it’ll be because our navel-gazing has gotten so intense that it now includes the entire lower halves of our bodies. Either that, or because the vast population of goth kids at Dartmouth decides to start wearing them ironically.

Then again, they’re also going to be sold by Mita, a Japanese company. We might have to eat our words about out-Ivying all those Japanese tourists.

Unconditional Raves

IvyGate has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New York Observer, Newsweek, New Yorker, and other publications, as well as NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, Drudge Report, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Wonkette, Jezebel, The Awl, and many more. Most are horrified.